Sure, there are plenty of music streaming services out there, and even ones with amazing shareable playlists, but Songza differentiates by falling right into that sweet spot between Spotify and Pandora. The app’s most interesting feature, Concierge, sets up playlists based on day and time, with filters for whatever mood you might be in.

For example, on Wednesday morning, Concierge says that I’m most likely to want to listen to something for Work Or Study, Still Waking Up, or Working Out. If I change the settings to give me music for Late Friday Night, options change to Getting High, Getting Lucky, Nightcap, A Sweaty Dance Party, or Bedtime.

So let’s say I’m hypothetically getting lucky… Songza will offer me certain filters for that particular “activity” like Heartfelt, Aggressive, Tongue And Cheek, Smooth, and Mellow. Unfortunately, the Concierge feature which launched in an update last week is only available on iOS and the web right now.

And that’s only one part of the app — the part that makes people like me, who aren’t up-to-date on music and don’t have the energy to explore, seem really awesome when friends come over.

But the other part of the app — Explore — is for those who love the fact that Pandora introduces them to brand new music. Of course, Concierge does the same thing, but the Explore tab really lets you find the best possible music for a specific circumstance.

So let’s pose another hypothetical: you’re throwing a dinner party. The food’s ready, the house is clean, and guests are set to arrive in five minutes. The only thing that isn’t prepped is the music, and you know that making a playlist (especially one that’s going to make you look like a music connoisseur) is going to take more than the five minutes that you have.

That’s where Songza comes in and takes care of all the heavy lifting.

All the music in the app is already a part of curated playlists, set up by what Songza refers to as a network of “music experts.” You can browse playlists based on moods (like Angsty, Gloomy, Introspective, Rowdy, Spacey, and Visceral), or even better, you can choose your playlist based on activity.

Songza’s list of activities is quite long and varied, and includes stuff like Coming Down After A Party, Between The Sheets, Coding, Driving In The Left Lane, Getting High, Lying Low On A Sunday Afternoon, Making Out, Waking Up On The Right Side Of The Bed, and a whole lot more.

I’ve been tooling around the the app for about 24 hours, and trying to get a feel for the playlists. I come away from the day knowing that I’ll use this again, if only for the ability to match music to mood or activity so quickly. But past that, I’ll keep using it simply so I don’t end up listening to the same stuff over and over and over again.

Pandora is amazing, but when you’re trying to get the music just right for a certain activity, like working or having a quiet cocktail party, there are only so many stations that suit your specific tastes. And then you end up listening to those same stations for the rest of your life until your ears bleed. Spotify, on the other hand, forces a lot of work out of the user. You really need to go out and find what you want and set it up properly.

Songza’s offerings change every time you jump into the app, simply based on time and day. But they’re also compiled by people who are experts in certain genres and artists. You may have a great Bob Marley inspired playlist, but it won’t be as great as a Bob Marley superfan’s playlist.

Long story short, I think Songza deserves a spot in the ring with the big boys, especially considering it’s free, there are no audio ads, and no monthly limits. But you’d have to try it out to see for yourself.

Google is launching a new feature today called Account Activity that will help users gain more insight into their usage of Google services. Available to those who opt in, the utility will offer monthly reports detailing your account activity, like your number of sign-ins, how many emails you sent and received, the browsers you used, the number of Google searches you performed, the number of places you visited on Google Latitude, and a ton of other things that showcase the vast amount of data Google stores on you.

The company says that it’s offering the feature, in part, to protect users from unauthorized activity. For example, in the company blog post, Google product manager Andreas Tuerk writes:

For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven't been or devices you've never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification.

While the report is something of a data nerds’ dream, its timely arrival hints at another purpose. The move follows Google’s decision to combine its privacy policies across all its services, starting at the beginning of this month, which resulted in treating users as “a single user across all our products,” as the company previously explained. That, of course, raised privacy concerns for some. The new Account Activity report offers a way for users to see exactly what they’re doing on Google, and how much of their life involves the use of Google’s products.

The new service is more like an extension to Google’s dashboard, then, which already gives users an overview of all their Google accounts and services in use – it just puts more data behind them.

BrowserQuest, playable in a browser near you, is a proof of concept so ingenious that you’ll wonder why they didn’t just build a Zelda clone and be done with it. In short, the site is a multi-player RPG based entirely on HTML5 with no Flash to be found.

The source code is free and open source and it uses WebSockets to communicate with a central server in order to render the movement of the other players. Quest states are saved automatically (although the quests are pretty limited in this demo.)

Here’s the coolest thing:

The folks at LittleWorkshop built the game as a proof of concept and as a time waster. Once they get the NES version of Metal Gear ported to HTML5, though, I’m totally quitting my job.

via Hacks.Mozilla

It’s no secret that publishers are scrambling to find ways of making money online. On the subscription/paywall side, a startup called MediaPass wants to help, and it just raised $1.75 million in Series B funding.

If publishers want to start offering subscriptions, MediaPass CEO Mathew Mitchell says that developing their own technology would probably take months of work and could cost in the seven figures. With MediaPass, they can just add a few lines of code. MediaPass integration is now easy for WordPress VIP customers too, because MediaPass is now one of the program’s featured partners.

Not surprisingly, Mitchell says traditional newspapers have been one of MediaPass’ big targets, but others customers include blogs and other publications in a variety of categories like fashion and automotive. The company’s technology allows you to tweak your subscription model over time, making it easy to experiment and see what works, he says. It also allows publishers to create subscription plans that provide access to a number of their properties.

Although MediaPass supports “metered” systems (similar to The New York Times, where someone can read 10 articles a month for free but have to pay after that), Mitchell says he sees more potential in creating a specific mix of free and paywalled content, although that mix will differ from site-to-site.

Publishers should think of their free readers as leads who might eventually become paying subscriptions, he says. For example, for a long time Mitchell read ESPN.com for free, but a year ago, he stumbled on a paywalled article that he really wanted to see, and since then he’s been a subscriber.

“What a meter does is give you 10 views free, and on the eleventh you’re asked to subscribe,” Mitchell says. “That’s rolling the dice and gambling that the article I see on the eleventh view is the one I’m willing to pay for.”

Investors in the round include Dun & Bradstreet CEO Jeff Stibel and MyLife CEO Jeff Tinsley.

Nearly 1 billion “smart devices” were shipped in 2011, analysts at IDC are reporting this morning, to the tune of over $489 billion in revenue. It’s an odd category, which IDC defines as “connected” smartphones, tablets, and even PCs. Looking ahead, the firm expects shipments of these devices to grow to 1.1 billion this year, and to reach 1.84 billion units by 2016 – a number that’s more than double the 2011 figure.

What’s interesting about the forecast is how it pits traditional Windows computers against Android and iOS, indicating the former’s decline. By 2016, Android-based devices running on ARM CPUs are estimated to reach a 31.1% – more than either iOS or Windows (x86), says IDC.

In 2011, Windows PCs running on any x86-compatible CPU lead with a 35.9% market share, while Android on ARM CPUs has a 29.4% share. iOS, meanwhile, is currently seeing a 14.6% share, IDC says.

By 2016, these numbers shift quite a bit. iOS is estimated to reach 17.3%, Android 31.1% and Windows will drop to 25.1%.

But the firm stops short of dubbing this market share forecast gain as any sort of “win” for Android, noting that hardware vendors in the market will find success tough to achieve, given the cheaply priced devices.

“Android’s growth is tied directly to the propagation of lower-priced devices,” said Tom Mainelli, research director, Mobile Connected Devices, “so, while we expect dozens of hardware vendors to own some share in the Android market, many will find profitability difficult to sustain,” he says.

Mainelli also notes that, despite iOS’s smaller market share, it will still attract a large percentage of developers, as iOS users have proven they’re willing to actually pay for quality mobile apps.

Given these qualifications, it hardly seems that you can count Android’s market share gains as a win…unless, of course, you’re Google lining up new eyeballs to read your ads.

Although IDC doesn’t get into the details, none of this is, as of yet, a zero-sum game – consumers aren’t dropping Windows to use Android tablets, or are only using iOS devices, for example. Consumers have multiple devices, and they’re not necessarily all from the same OS maker or OEM. Consumers may have an iPad but also an Android phone, for example. They might run Windows, but use an iPhone.

Of course, for Microsoft’s and Apple’s purposes at least, the goal is to create more of an ecosystem between their platforms (Windows, Windows Phone, e.g. or OS X and iOS). To a lesser extent, Google with its Chrome OS is pursuing a similar strategy. The latter feels more experimental, however, with less of an ecosystem feel beyond universal support for Google cloud services, and a handful of Chrome extensions that work with Android, that is.

IDC calls the new era “PC Plus,” which is really a better moniker than “post-PC” as it implies multiple devices, not the end of the PC entirely.

timeRAZOR, the D.C.-area startup which raised $3.4 million pre-launch to build a better events finder, has arrived today on mobile. The new apps, available for both iOS and Android, work by using your phone’s geolocation features combined with a built-in recommendation engine to help suggest nearby events that you may have otherwise missed. It also integrates with your phone’s built-in calendar, to suggest events taking place near your out-of-office meetings and social appointments.

The company has several things going for it, not only its good-sized angel funding round, but also a big events database, cross-platform support, and a board that includes comScore co-founder Linda Abraham, former Microsoft exec Eddie Amos and Gene Riechers, co-founder and senior advisor at Valhalla Partners. And it has relatively robust roster of launch partners – a list that already has several well-known brands participating. The brands are partnering with timeRAZOR to offer users “carefully selected experiences,” which means they’ll deliver unique, special and limited-quantity promotions to the app’s users, which show up when those people are nearby, or are planning to be nearby, the event venue.

At launch the list of partners includes Chrysler SRT, Dodge Viper, Guardian Angel Motorsports, L'Oreal's Active Cosmetics Division, Marriott Renaissance Hotels, CBRE, World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA), Vail Valley Foundation, JetSet Studios, several local retail properties (The Shops at Dos Lagos, The Village at Leesburg and West 7th), Boston-area HWS Group's four minor league baseball teams, and some other Fortune 500 companies and local brands.

“They are experiences and events,” explains timeRAZAR co-founder Victoria Clark of the offers the brands will soon provide users. “[The brands have] really invested a lot of money in these experiential marketing campaigns. They’re bringing interesting and cool content,” she says, like “really incredible live music that they’re sponsoring or having for free.” For an example of the type of experience they mean: a pop-up concert where there are a limited number of tickets available.

The app currently pulls in over 300,000 event listings per day from over 100 different sources, making it one of the larger events databases available. Some of the events are scraped, while others are pulled in through partnership agreements.

The events are organized within the app in various sections: “planned,” “possible,” “for me” and “by me,” meaning those you have on your calendar, available events, recommended events, and those special events you’ve chosen to attend, respectively. You can add them to your phone’s calendar, view event details, share them with friends and even get “travel time” alerts that tell you when you need to leave to make the event.

And now for the bad news: the app is kind of a mess. (I tested the iPhone version). The user interface is unattractive, it doesn’t flow, buttons like “add to calendar” are hard to press (hint: press just the orange button, not the text beside it), and even the choice of icon leaves me cold. It’s bright orange, emblazoned with big, white text reading “NEVER MISS OUT.”

Maybe I’m picky, but this app just didn’t do it for me.

Co-founder Jeff White says the company has been busy focusing on the backend, and the complexities of those systems. Responding to my rant feedback, he explains that they decided to put something out there that already does a lot for people from the get-go, even if its not “pretty.” Writes White:

Trying to solve the question of what is interesting and convenient to do at any given point in a person’s day is pretty complex, so we focused on the working professional (for now) since that’s such a key section of smartphone users. Their schedules are full, they travel – they rely heavily on their phones to help them figure out where to go and what to do….Yeah, it could be prettier – but it’s really not that god-awful, is it? – but we think it’s a lot more functional than something pretty that does one thing. Or 400 pretty things that do one thing each.

Indeed, the app may be functional, but to get users to return, apps need to engage, attract, and be enjoyable to use, too. At least that’s how it usually works.

You can give it a test drive for yourself and form your own opinion. The app is available for download here.

SpotlessCity launched in January and is just now building up steam to disrupt the entire “going to the laundry” industry. Built by Sonny Bajwa and his Brooklyn team, the site allows you to find a dry cleaner and request a pick-up. Bingo, bango, and your clothes are clean. God forbid you should go for a walk of an evening to drop off your unmentionables, but let’s not get into that here.

According to a January article about the service, Bajwa founded the company after seeing that his wife’s chores – cooking, buying food – could be done via laptop, while his chore – taking the laundry down the street – required him to leave the house. Thus, SpotlessCity was born.

The service is fairly simple and places the onus on the dry cleaner to follow through with the order. SpotlessCity doesn’t take a cut from the customer but instead gets a little cash from the dry cleaner to streamline a service they already offer. They operate in the Village, SoHo, and the Upper East Side in Manhattan and in and around Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn. They’re expanding to all of NYC shortly and will slowly expand to take over the world.

These friction-reduction services are valuable, but difficult to scale. For example, the SpotlessCity folks actually have to go from laundromat to laundromat to gain service providers, a speed bump that could slow down overall adoption. As it stands, however, I think there are plenty of people who would love a fire-and-forget system for warshin’ and foldin’ their britches and SpotlessCity seems to be the first to market.

Incidentally, you can get 20% off with the coupon code “NYTECHM”. They attended last nights NYTM in Manhattan.

Sadly, they don’t offer service in my area so I’m stuck sitting in my own filth.

Carvoyant is a new service that aims to maintain your car’s “health records” in the cloud, while also keeping track of when you need repairs, where you should go, and what that blasted “check engine” light means, already! To build the database containing your car’s health and service history, the company uses data gathered from a transmitter you plug into the car itself, as well as from the records and receipts which you send in for digitization.

While the idea of a gadget you plug into the car to keep track of its current status may lead to comparisons with similar companies like CarMD, for example, Carvoyant’s focus is not on building a better transmitter and app, it’s about building a service that connects consumers and repair shops together at the very moment when car maintenance or repairs need to take place.

Basically, it’s the cloud for your car.

For companies like CarMD, or AutoMD, or even apps like RepairPal, Carvoyant wouldn’t necessarily serve as competition, but rather as a partner whose data could be integrated through the use of APIs.

When you first sign up for the service (still in private beta – see invites below), the company ships you the transmitter and a few postage paid envelopes, which you stuff with all those receipts and tickets from your past service visits to auto repair shops, your dealership, the place where you last had your oil changed, etc. Basically, you just clear out your glove comparent. You can also choose to scan and email in those documents, if you prefer.

You then connect the transmitter to your car. The device plugs into the car’s onboard diagnostic port (OBD), and immediately begins capturing your car’s data stream. For the driver, the big selling point here is that the device will tell you when something goes wrong – like when that stupid “check engine” light comes on, for example.

However, clarifies Carvoyant CEO Bret Tobey, “it’s not about replacing your mechanic, it’s about keeping you informed,” he says. “It gives you a little bit of extra assurance.”

But the service won’t only be reactive in nature, it will also be proactive. For example, it can track your battery voltage, and will warn you when your battery is starting to go. Your car may still be starting fine when the warning appears, but Carvoyant will know that the battery needs to be replaced soon. Over time, the service will be able to do more of these types of proactive alerts based on the data it collects.

The third piece to Carvoyant is recommendations. This part of the service is still under development during Carvoyant’s private beta, but eventually the goal is to allow users to reach out however they see fit: email, SMS or via Facebook, for example.

For drivers, the service itself is free to use, and is accessible both online and as a mobile application. Right now, the mobile app is Android-only due to hardware issues related to the way the transmitters leverage Bluetooth to connect with the app on mobile handsets. However, Carvoyant has some prototype devices being built now for iPhone users.

The service is sort of a “set it and forget it” utility – once configured, there’s nothing much to see or do within the app or online dashboard. You’re only alerted when there’s something that needs to be addressed.

At launch, users will have to purchase the actual hardware in question from Carvoyant itself ($29.99), but the service is being built in a way so that won’t be a requirement in the future. The idea is that it will support a variety of transmitters, as Carvoyant’s real goal is not to function as a hardware reseller, but rather as the cloud-based service provider where your car’s data is stored.

Further down the road, the business model will involve allowing service providers to narrowly target users in need of maintenance and repairs with ads, offers and deals. For example, Carvoyant could partner with a company like Jiffy Lube, which could even give away the hardware devices for free, if they chose, in exchange for preferred placement in the communications sent to drivers.

For merchants, the system would mean better targeting than they get with those junk mail fliers that clutter mailboxes today, while for end users, they would get offers and coupons right when they really need them –  and without having to hand over their personal information directly to the auto repair shops themselves. (The data would be anonymized beforehand with Carvoyant serving as the middleman).

The Tampa-based company was originally called AutoIQ when it took in seed funding from local accelerator Gazelle Lab, a member of the Global Accelerator Network (previously known as the TechStars Network, prior to rebranding). The startup has also raised a modest sum of seed funding from angel investors and is in active talks with VC’s now.

Although still in private beta testing, TechCrunch readers can get a first look by signing up here. The link will provide Android users with early access to register for the service, as well as a free transmitter for the first 500 sign-ups.

Update: The original press release for this announcement was in Korean only, and the translation left some room for debate over whether or not Samsung was talking about actual sales or shipments. But, we’ve received confirmation from Samsung that the 5 million figure is referencing actual sales to human beings and not shipments to retail channels.

As much as I love Samsung hardware, I’ve felt for a long while now that the Galaxy Note was a bit of a mistake. The screen size is just too big for me to wield the device comfortably, and I see no real value in the S-Pen other than having a little fun during bored moments.

But a good chunk of people out there in the world apparently disagree with me, as Samsung has just announced that the South Korea-based company has shipped 5 million units of the Galaxy Note phablet. At the start of this month, Samsung had sold 2 million Galaxy Notes globally — a solid stat albeit not equal to Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S sales.

It’s important to note (heh) that the March 2 announcement (2 million units) refers to actual sales, whereas this morning’s news just counts Galaxy Notes shipped. The numbers can often be very different, but the fact that Samsung sold so many Notes over the past five months and that it feels comfortable sending out 5 million more tells us that the Note is officially a big dog in the mobile arena.

To be honest, I’m much more excited about this Galaxy Note 10.1 that debuted at Mobile World Congress. A 10-inch tablet is exactly what the Note should have always been, and should make the S-Pen much more useful. In any case, congrats to Samsung for yet another successful device.

Now we can all move on to lust after the Galaxy S III.

[via Ubergizmo]

Longtime readers may already know that I have a peculiar fixation on white phones, and I’ll admit that my heart went a-quiver when AT&T revealed that a white Lumia 900 would be released shortly after its black and cyan brethren.

For those of who share my particular predilection, take a gander at AT&T’s latest snowy-white handset, which is scheduled to land on store shelves on April 22 with the same $99 price tag.

The Lumia series pretty damned handsome in general, but I think the white 900 oozes just a bit more style than the others. It’s a little hard to tell from the photo, but the white 900 actually sports a glossy shell rather than the matte finish used by its more more colorful friends. That means fingerprints abound, though with any luck the bright white color scheme would help keep most of them out of sight.

This isn’t the first time a photo of the white Lumia 900 has made the rounds — Nokia couldn’t quite keep its existence quiet back in February, as a photo of the device briefly appeared on the company’s Facebook account before it was unceremoniously yanked. Nokia reportedly offered the white 900 variant to AT&T to sell along with the others, but WPCentral reports that the carrier had turned it down at the time. As someone who appreciates a slew of chromatic choices, I have to thank them for that.

[via EverythingWM]

A palate-cleanser for the four course meal that will be your long and fruitful day: Yoni Heisler recounts a talk by Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus in which he describes the naming process. Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian and Kittlaus owned the siri.com domain. He was planning on naming a child after said beautiful woman but his first child was a boy. Instead, he named his product after her.

Once Apple bought the company, Kittlaus was brought into Apple HQ to speak to Scott Forstall. After a bit of hemming and hawing, he was sent to meet with Steve Jobs in secret.

Steve initially didn’t like the name Siri for the iPhone’s voice assistant but, unable to find a better name (Ethel, maybe?) he settled on a Norwegian warrior goddess. And now you know… the rest of the story.

Hacks make the world fun. This one came by way of a Microsoft hackathon hosted in France where Windows Phone dev Rudy Huyn cobbled together what’s shown above. Using 29 Windows Phones of various makes and models, he coded a little hack that allowed Bing Maps to be displayed across multiple devices. One phone did the scrolling and navigating, and then the other phones, each using their own data connection, worked together to display the map as if it was one.

Huyn notes in the comments of WPCentral that it’s not a real application, “just a challenge I did.” He also explains the lag was the result of the poor data connection. With a faster connection, he notes, there would be no problem rending the maps quicker.

As Windows Phones grow in popularity, hopefully more engineering hackers will latch onto the platform. Success follows 3rd party support. Windows Phones needs killer apps more than anything right now. Well, killer apps, stronger marketing, and better carrier support — you know, the little things.

Cloud storage platform Box has long offered a web-based app directory that includes apps for services like Salesforce, and others that enhance the storage platform’s capabilities. And last year the company launched a platform for developers building off of the Box platform, called the Box Innovation Network (/bin). Today, Box is taking development and its app directory mobile with the launch of Box OneCloud, a mobile cloud for the enterprise that provides a suite of more than 30 productivity applications, allowing businesses to access, edit, and share content from their mobile devices.

Box, which now has over 10 million users with more than 200 million files accessed via Box each month, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged, multi-platform collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. The company says 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Box.

As co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie explains to us, Box OneCloud is the culmination of several years of work. “We’re taking the idea that we are in the post-PC world and seeing how that fits in with Box,” he explains. And by the Post-PC era, he refers to the movement in the enterprise towards mobile platforms.

Box OneCloud represents the company’s vision for how businesses and their workers will access, edit and interact with documents on their mobile devices, including both smartphones and tablets. In basic terms, Box OneCloud is a new set of APIs and an all new directory for mobile that will introduce users to applications powered by Box within the Box interface. “This is how the enterprise use applications in post-PC world,” Levie says emphatically.

Today, the company is debuting 30 Box OneCloud apps that help users discover, create and share content from their mobile devices. Partners that will be launching apps include Podio, Quickoffice, Adobe EchoSign, Nuance PaperPort Notes and PDF Expert. With new APIs, content updates for each app are instantly stored and secured on Box. Partners provide a variety of services that are complimentary to Box’s storage offerings including advanced document editing, secure e-signature, digital note taking and PDF annotation.

All OneCloud integrations are accessible via a new Box mobile app gallery, enabling users to easily browse and download the catalog of Box OneCloud apps to their iOS device.

Here’s how it works: You open the Box app via the iPad, iPhone, Android, Android tablet or other device, click on a particular document, and then are given set of usability options based on the apps you’ve installed that work with Box. For example, you could download the EchoSign app, and use the digital signature technology for a contract stored via Box.

The Box OneCloud platform will also include a collection of new developer tools, making it easier than ever to build mobile application integrations with Box. The company says the new Box App to App Integration Framework significantly reduces the amount of time – from weeks to days – to develop apps with Box by integrating directly to the file management capabilities of Box's mobile platform. Additionally, access to content stored in Box, including offline access, has been made seamless for developers.

Box OneCloud is available today for iOS and will be extended to Android soon, says the company.

Levie says the next iteration of OneCloud will see new types of apps emerge and built on top of the platform, similar to the way that many web apps have been built off of Box’s platform. As of November, Box had 4,500 API partners and was seeing 200 million API calls per month.

Armed with $81 million in new cash, Box is looking to break ground when it comes to cloud storage and mobile (and beat Microsoft at the same time). Mobile is a huge growth area for the company. Specifically, Box says it has seen eight times growth in total unique mobile users with Android growing at the fastest rate. And 77 percent of Box users access their content from six different locations and on at least three different devices.

As Levie tells us, “We want Box to be center of all business work flow and the go-to mobile business operating system.” It’s clear when talking to Levie, that he believes mobile is the future, and is investing heavily in products relating to cross-platform accessibility.

““

Social enterprise company Jive has been providing a social collaboration product to businesses for some time now; and many customers have been using the platform as an intranet of sorts, says Jive. But today, Jive has taken what customers have liked with its existing internal social networks, and packaged up right capabilities and services with the launch of a dedicated social intranet for the enterprise.

As you may know, Jive is one of the giants on the social enterprise space. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive's software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured, internal social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, social networking features and more.

While it sounds outdated, Jive says that many businesses rely on traditional, stale intranets for company-wide communication and team collaboration. Jive is hoping to disrupt this space by offering a more social intranet platform that includes gamification elements as well as a deep integration with Microsoft applications.

The Jive, collaborative intranet includes document creation and editing, content sharing, search as well as intelligent recommendations and filtered activity streams. The platform also integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Office, and SharePoint; has enterprise-level controls for security, privacy, permissions and compliance; and supports access from the Blackberry, Android, iPhone, and iPad.

And powered by Bunchball, Jive is adding gamification to its products, including its internal social networks for companies as well as intranets. So now managers can create and implement role-based missions and challenges, status levels and badges, team-based goals and competitions, receive real-time feedback, and coordinate fulfillment of virtual or physical rewards. In fact, the module tracks over a hundred specific Jive actions that can be used to define challenges and determine user rewards.

Jive’s new feature enables customers to design incentive programs, or missions, for different types of users and groups within a Jive network. Game mechanics can be personalized to motivate and reward people based on precise user segmentation including geography, roles, or departments.

For Jive, tackling social intranets makes sense considering the company’s existing solutions were already being used for the same purpose. But other companies like Yammer and even Box are also playing in the space and will provide formidable competition to Jive.

StyleTread, the leading Australian online shoe store modeled around Zappos principles, has secured a Series C financing of AUD$12 million led by Starfish Ventures, joining existing investors Lakestar, Nine Entertainment Co., and Adinvest. Nine Entertainment recently invested $4 million and is further evidence of a bit of a tech boom in Australia, where a few startups have emerged in recent years including 99designs, Envato, Remember the Milk, SitePoint and DesignCrowd, though many prefer to bootstrap at the outset rather than take VC.

Founded by Mark Rowland and Bjorn Behrendt (a former Berlin-based entrepreneur) in late 2010 using incubation capital from Lakestar, StyleTread is going up against Samwer Zappos clone Zalando. The Germans against the Germans it would seem.

Based in Melbourne, Starfish Ventures is a venture capital firm with over $400 million under management. The investment from Starfish, who will now hold a significant stake in the company plus the increased investment by Nine Entertainment Co., means that StyleTread is now owned by a majority of Australian shareholders. Bonza!

The European antitrust investigation of Google, originally filed November 2010, looks like it might be entering the next stage of its development.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), a consumer-rights group that represents 42 regional groups in 31 countries, says that it expects the Competition Commission to release its findings “within days” and possibly by the end of this week.

For anyone watching how these antitrust cases develop and get decided, if we do see a decision within days, that is a big deal.

That’s because there is something deeply frustrating about regulatory investigations. Created to help right the wrongs of big companies impacting smaller ones and consumers, decisions can take years to emerge while business continues as usual.

Today’s Google news comes after BEUC this week released a letter it had sent to the investigators earlier in the month, outlining  why it believes Google is behaving in a non-competitive way that affects competitors and consumers.

That letter, sent by BEUC director general Monique Goyens, focuses on how Google has used its role as “gatekeeper to the Internet” to “restrict access to its competitors and direct traffic to its own services.”

“Google regularly places its own services at or near the top of Google's search results and diverts traffic from its competitors to its own services,” Goyens writes. Within search, BEUC points out that it provides specific results that also drive traffic to its other services covering areas like maps, video and books (Google Maps, YouTube and Google Books, respectively). It doesn’t mention advertising, although ultimately that is the glue that connects Google’s business, and is another area where the company has created a strong position as a result of its position in search.

“We are seriously concerned that if these allegations are substantiated by the Commission's analysis and investigation, consumers have suffered harm from Google's dominance by being provided with partial results of their search queries and thus being deprived of the possibility to make informed choices,” she writes.

BEUC advocates unspecified penalities against the company if that is the case: “It is important that the European Commission exercises its powers to sanction dominant companies who abuse their position to the detriment of consumer welfare.”

A spokesperson for BEUC says that the next step for the commission is to publish a “Statement of Objections” that will list potential infringements of EU Competition law by Google. Google will then have a chance to respond to any allegations before the next step — penalties — if it has been found to be in breach of competition laws. “We expect the European Commission to take its next steps in the coming days,” the spokesperson said, “but cannot give 100% confirmation it will be this week.”

The statement comes after the New York Times published a story quoting European parliament member Andreas Schwab saying he thought the antitrust commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, was working as quickly as possible.

The European antitrust case against Microsoft and bundling of services like Internet Explorer, for example, took 10 years to go from complaint to $2 billion penalty. That was in 2008 — arguably at a time when Microsoft’s domination was already starting to erode anyway.

Ironically, one of the companies now pursuing the antitrust complaint against Google is Microsoft. The company is part of a group called FairSearch, launched around the time of the complaint, and also includes a number of travel sites, such as Expedia, Travelocity and Kayak.

The Competition Commission will be weighing up whether Google’s search dominance is enough to stifle competition for others, but just taking its position in search on its own, the leadership Google has is hard to ignore. Here’s the lay of the land in the last three months on PC search and mobile search. Currently, Google respectively has 91 percent and 97 percent of the search market:

A big step today for both Nokia and Microsoft in their bid to be at the center of the huge smartphone growth currently underway in China and other emerging markets: Nokia today paired up with China Telecom to formally launch the Nokia 800C, the first CDMA Windows Phone to hit China, and the first of Nokia’s Lumia line of high-end devices tailored specifically for that market.

The two also said that it would be following this up with a lower-cost CDMA handset, the 610C, in Q2. This handset is especially crucial in testing whether Nokia will be able to retain its smartphone leadership in emerging markets as it continues its transition from Symbian to Windows Phone, and Android continues its low-cost march up the sales charts.

China Telecom, which is built on a CDMA network, is the third-largest carrier in the country, but still has more subscribers than many of the number-one carriers in other countries: as of February, it said it had 132.33 million subscribers, with 41.15 million of them on 3G. As of January, there were 136.6 million 3G subscribers in the country, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Rival carrier China Unicom believes that number could double this year. Others have predicted that this year China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest smartphone market.

It has also, more recently, been in the news for smartphone launches for another reason: After years of not offering the iPhone on its network, China Telecom finally started to sell the device earlier this month. But while people were long anticipating China Telecom carrying the device — as a route to Apple picking up significantly more market share in the country — some have suggested that the kind of subsidies that China Telecom might have to attach to the device would ultimately hurt its profitability: while Apple is selling the iPhone 4S for 4,988 yuan ($790) for a 16GB model, the same device costs only 289 yuan per month with China Telecom if a user signs a three-year contract.

That gives Nokia (and Microsoft) an opening in the market. So far, Nokia’s pricing for the Lumia 800C is coming in below Apple’s iPhone 4S: without a contract, it’s going for 3599 yuan ($570). It’s unclear what kind of pricing the 610C will have with China Telecom, but there is a clear opportunity, especially with the lower-end device, for China Telecom to claw back some of those lost margins, while still offering a shiny, new device to the masses.

Nokia and Microsoft are looking to attract Chinese consumers with content that is very much aimed specifically at them. That will include support for popular portals Sina, SOHU, Tencent and Renren; Nokia Maps local content integration from web portals Fantong, Jiepang, Ctrip, Qunar and Soufun; local Nokia Drive navigation; and a selection of Chinese hits in Nokia Music — as well as 20,000 local apps in the Marketplace app store (with a new developer push to encourage more).

Additionally, it looks like Trends, a fashion magazine reading app, will be populated with local content. And there are some freebies, too: those buying Lumia devices in China get 100,000 free plays of Fruit Ninja and PVZ — these will be in the Nokia Collection, which is Nokia’s curated selection of apps.

The devices will also be part of a new retail push from China Telecom targeting the youth market, a chain of shops called Tianyi FlyYoung.

Apple has yet to make any statements about where and when we might ever see an Apple TV product to match the impact it has had in the smartphone and tablet markets. But news of an investment by its key manufacturing partner, Foxconn, could point to the confidence others have of what might be coming soon.

Foxconn is investing a combined 133 billion yen ($1.6 billion) in TV maker Sharp Corporation and a flat-panel JV it has with Sony — and it has added a commitment to buy up to 50 percent of all of Sharp’s LCD panel output. The deal is the largest-ever by a Taiwanese manufacturer in a Japanese supplier and could be all the more bold, considering that just yesterday there was a report from iSuppli on how sales of flat-panel TVs were in decline and flattening out.

Foxconn’s investment will see the company split its $1.6 billion roughly between two investments: a 9.9 percent stake in Sharp Corp., with a 46.5 percent stake in Sharp Display Products Corp., its flat-panel JV with Sony. Sharp’s stake in the JV is now 46.5 percent; while Sony’s is 7 percent, and it may now choose to divest that to Sharp altogether.

There are a couple of reasons for why Foxconn has made this investment.

The move could be be to make sure it will have a good supply of flat panels for future products, such as the fabled Apple TV, but also iPad devices and other flat-panel devices that Foxconn makes on behalf of others such as Sony. IHS says that Sharp may be in line to supply panels for iPad tablets starting next month, using its IGZO technology.

The other reason is that Foxconn may be trying to shore up a key supplier that is in financial hot water at the moment. “[Sharp is] in trouble and their very survival is at stake," Edwin Merner, president of Tokyo-based Atlantis Investment Research, told Bloomberg. "Maybe the tie-up will help."

Sharp last month warned the markets that it could face a ¥290 billion ($3.5 billion) loss for the financial year because of the drop in prices for TVs — a problem that has also been affecting Sony and Panasonic, with the three collectively expected to report losses of $16 billion for the financial year.

Foxconn’s parent company Hon Hai, meanwhile, yesterday reported rises in both sales (NT$1.074 trillion; $36 billion) and net profit (NT$35.0 billion; $1.2 billion) on the back of lucrative manufacturing deals with the likes of Apple, which sold 3 million units of its new iPad tablet in the first three days of release alone.

Earlier this month, Opera and Android briefly made headlines together when one analytics firm found that Google’s OS, Android, had finally overtaken Opera as the world’s largest mobile browser. Today, the two are in the news again for a slightly different reason: Opera is releasing the newest version of its popular (and free) Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers with added camera, HTML5 and 3D graphics support — one way for Opera to claw back some share on Android, currently the biggest smartphone platform in the world.

The new version of the browser is something that Opera had hinted was in the works back in February, when it announced deals to further its reach in the area of mobile payments. As with that news, today’s release is another example of how mobile browser developers are looking to add more features to make their products more like native platform experiences. The release comes at the same time that Opera has also released a new edition of its browser for Symbian.

Opera’s title as the world’s largest browser has partly been because it was an early mover and works across a range of feature-phone and smartphone platforms. It says that it is currently used by some 160 million people worldwide. Given that Android is now the biggest smartphone platform around and able to gain ground on Opera simply through that market share, it was essential for Opera to update and go one step further than it had before.

New features include the ability to create an unlimited number of bookmarks (“Speed Dials”) to quickly go to your favorite URLs — before there had been a limit of nine. This new version of Opera Mobile now also includes camera support, as well as better support for HTML5 sites’ functionality through its Ragnarök technology. It is also adding WebGL support, for 3D functionality. WebGL is used in the development of cross-platform games.

Opera has long said that one of its strongest points against other browsers — and platforms’ native clients — is its page compression technology, which improves the speed of browsing on the mobile web. In the new version of Opera Mini, it’s taking that one step further and claiming that it’s actually cheaper to use it than its competition because it compresses web pages up to 90 percent. Other improvements, it says, include faster panning around sites.

Ironically, the most up-to-date figures from StatCounter, the company that said Android had overtaken Opera, show that, in fact, Opera Mini is back on top over Android as the world’s most popular browser. The fact that the rankings change so frequently point to how important it is to keep innovating on features to keep users loyal.

Like that “pull-to-refresh” feature found in many popular iOS apps, including Twitter, Facebook, Tweetbot, Sparrow and others? Been wondering why Apple hasn’t implemented the same thing in its own apps, like Safari or Mail, for example, when such a thing would make for a dramatically improved user experience? As it turns out, the reason why the feature hasn’t made its way into Apple’s core iOS apps may have to do with a patent application titled “User Interface Mechanics” – an application which lists the inventor as Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie. You know…Tweetie? The app Twitter acquired back in 2010, which later became the official iOS Twitter client?

Yep, Twitter is trying to patent “pull to refresh.” But the patent app doesn’t stop there – it goes after anything that issues a command on pulling down a menu.

The patent app describes the innovation like this:

Methods, computer readable media, and apparatuses for providing enhanced user interface mechanics are presented. In one arrangement, a scrollable list of content items may be displayed. Input associated with a scroll command may be received. Then, based on the scroll command, a scrollable refresh trigger may be displayed. Subsequently, the scrollable list of content items may be refreshed in response to determining, based on the scroll command, that the scrollable refresh trigger has been activated. In at least one instance, it may be determined that the scrollable refresh trigger has been activated in response to determining that the scroll command was completed while the scrollable refresh trigger was fully displayed.

The details of the patent app (20100199180 A1) were posted by Dustin Curtis following a Twitter conversation he had with Tapbots designer Mark Jardine and developer Paul Hadddad, the team behind one of the best third-party Twitter clients out there, Tweetbot. Haddad’s subsequent tweets imply he’s not worried about the situation, however:

@dcurtis Twitter has a patent on it, though they’ve said they wouldn’t enforce it.

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) March 26, 2012

#ProTip Every large software company has large piles of patents, most of dubious merit. Most use them as a purely defensive measure.

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) March 27, 2012

Twitter is remarkably good at contributing opensource, some impressive stuff too. Patent attacks from them aren’t something I worry about.

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) March 27, 2012

Nothing to see here, carry on?

Sure OK. Except that Twitter doesn’t always do what’s best for third-party developers, Twitter does what’s best for Twitter. And while what’s best for Twitter right now (assuming it was granted the patent) is to not enforce it, that’s not to say that would always be the case. After all, if Twitter decided one day it needed to launch a patent attack on an uprising competitor, then it would do so if that’s what it had to do. And defending the patent would then mean other apps could get caught in the crossfire of the attack. So let’s hope it never comes to that.

Also, just to be clear, it was Britcher who said he wouldn’t enforce it.

We have to point out, too, that this patent app is old news – it was filed back in 2010. Still, it was clearly a surprise to some folks, including John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog chronicles the ins and outs of Apple with an insider’s viewpoint. “I did not know Twitter had a patent on this,” he writes. He’s not alone. Many of the sites picked up the news today like it’s the first they’re hearing of it, too. It’s one of those little things that flew under the radar until a perfect storm of reblogging caught everyone off guard. (Cough, ahem.)

One of the more opinionated posts on the situation comes from Jeremy Stanley, who notes that Apple reportedly uses uses pull-to-refresh in some of its own internal apps. (Yep it does. And we’ve confirmed, too.) Interesting that the feature hasn’t made it to the public-facing apps yet, then.

And if you’re wondering why there’s been so much interest in this one patent app, when every tech company under the sun has stockpiles of patents at their disposal, it comes down to the nature of the interaction being published. It’s a feature that feels so obvious, so natural, and so much like the way things are supposed to work on iOS devices, that many assumed it would eventually be translated into the core Apple apps. It feels like something Apple itself should have patented, then graciously suggested to iOS developers and designers that it’s the preferred way to refresh data in their apps.

How odd if such a thing should fall in Twitter’s hands instead.

Good thing Twitter and Apple are best friends.

Image credits, ht: effreysambells.com; obamapacman.com